I have a longstanding fascination with fungi—their interconnectedness, their otherness, their ability to emerge from seemingly nothing. I also have a longstanding fascination with serial killers and the dehumanization they inflict. When I began writing “Primordium” it was only a vignette about mushrooms and their drifting spores, but it grew unexpectedly to incorporate both interests.

Watching Jules claw his way back to life was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. This was the kind of scene artists immortalized with gold and lapis lazuli illumination, the kind of scene that soared, heaven-seeking, up cathedral vaults, buoyed by choirs of castrati. One moment, Jules was twitching in a pool of his own blood, and the next, he shuddered back into himself, lips opening like a crescent moon.

It is something that is just accepted: forests are places where things become lost. There is a dark, entangled history that grows in the shadows of the woods, weaving through myth and legend—through stories we have told and warnings we have whispered into the night. The forest is the void of the unknown, a ravenous mouth that picks clean the bones of trespassers because the forest has a stomach, and that stomach has never been full.

Lisa Morton literally wrote the book on seances and spiritualism (you should all check out her delightful book Calling the Spirits). Here’s a short reading guide from her compiling great fiction about ghost hunters.

I.
Simple, tiny blood-cuts on a calf.
She cut herself shaving. The wind whipped
weasel-clawed, in circles around her legs.